Candel Therapeutics, Inc. announced the Company will present a poster presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting taking place April 5-10, 2024, in San Diego, CA. The presentation will describe the second candidate from the enLIGHTEN? Discovery Platform, a first-in-class multimodal immunotherapy candidate for induction of tertiary lymphoid structures as a novel therapeutic strategy for solid tumors.

This abstract presentation at AACR accelerates the milestone associated with the unveiling of the second enLIGHTEN? program, which was originally planned for the third quarter of 2024. The enLIGHTEN?

Discovery Platform is a systematic, iterative herpes simplex virus (HSV)-based discovery platform leveraging human biology and advanced analytics to create new multimodal biological immunotherapies for solid tumors. The enLIGHTEN? Discovery Platform has been designed to deconvolute the characteristics of the tumor microenvironment related to clinical outcomes.

These discoveries are rapidly translated into optimized multi-gene payloads of tumor modulators that can be delivered to the tumor microenvironment for specific indications, disease stages, and rationally designed therapeutic combinations. In 2022, the Company announced a discovery partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Center for Cellular Immunotherapies to create new viral immunotherapies that could enhance the efficacy of chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy in solid tumors. During the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 2023 Annual Meeting and the 2023 International Oncolytic Virus Conference, Candel presented encouraging data on the first candidate from this platform, Alpha 201-macro-1, which was designed to interfere with the CD47/SIRP1a pathway, in mouse models of breast cancer and lung cancer.